Pain Medicine News

Do you really need to prescribe an opioid after dental surgery? Possibly not to every patient, according to new research presented at PAINWeek 2021. This doesn’t just mean that fewer opioid-naive patients would be exposed to an opioid, researcher Todd Bertoch, MD, told Pain Medicine News. “The dental impaction pain model has been the main acute pain model that's used to assess the efficacy of analgesics,” Bertoch, the CEO of JBR Clinical Research, in Salt Lake City, explained—meaning that results of wisdom tooth removal studies can in some ways be applied to other examples of acute pain.

Navigating pain care for both patients and providers alike has continued in complexity two years after the first COVID-19 cases were discovered in China and about 21 months following the beginning of U.S. shutdowns in March 2020. “Things have been really hard in Arkansas recently,” Johnathan H. Goree, MD, an interventional pain physician, told Pain Medicine News in an interview at PAINWeek 2021, where he conducted a lecture on the pandemic’s effects on pain care. As COVID-19 cases have surged in Goree’s home of Arkansas—largely due to low rates of vaccination, he said—problems from staffing shortages to telemedicine access issues have kept providers on their toes, readjusting their practices to reach their patients at need.

It’s not just opioids that can cause respiratory depression. A variety of different medications alone or in combination can be a dangerous mix, which is why Lynn Webster, MD, and his colleague have devised a system for rating medications’ likelihood of causing respiratory depression. Webster, who is a senior fellow at the Center for U.S. Policy and a Pain Medicine News editorial advisory board member, was interviewed during PAINWeek 2021.